The Comics Rack

Digression the Fifth: Odds and Ends

• DC announced they would start a graphic novel line soon after Marvel showed success in the field. Unlike Marvel, however, the DC line would not be tied to their current super-heroes (and for the record, I believe that one the Elric graphic novel and a later title called Super Boxers didn't feature any Marvel heroes). As I recall, the first DC release was called something like Star Raiders and was a tie-in to some game by Atari. Next came some drivel about dwarves or elves or something. Seems like there may have been a third and then, saving the worst for last, came Me and Joe Priest. In some insane twist on A Boy and His Dog (or Hell Comes to Frogtown, for that matter), there is only one fertile man left on Earth, but he is a priest! Ho, ho, ha, ha! To say the book sold poorly would be to give it too much credit and we found we couldn't even give away free copies to our regulars.
• DC next announced they would start a series of graphic novel adaptations of stories by famous science fiction authors that would have the science fiction fans beating down our doors to explore the wonder of comic books. The problem, these monstrosities were all downright ugly, with a lot of impressionistic drawings that weren't quite sequential comics. I recall a heated discussion I had with a name comic writer at a friend's store over this new line. I claimed they were butt ugly and would sell poorly, the comic writer claimed that the author's name on the cover would bring in readers who would never think about reading a comic book. To DC's credit, they did get shelf space at Walden's and Dalton's, but the line failed. Bad comics are bad comics and, in fact, the only title that did have decent sales was the Marshall Rogers' version of Harlan Ellison's "Demon with a Glass Hand," which was done in standard comic book style. Of course, it didn't hurt that it came out at a time when you could slap Ellison's name on most anything and it would sell...
• I've mentioned the Black and White Explosion (or Glut, take your pick) a couple of times previously and it seems that this is as good a time as any to mention this period in comics:
  • From the beginning of the comic industry, nearly all comics were printed in color. The magazine sized issues of Mad were probably the first exception to this rule and the underground comix of the 60s were nearly all printed in black and white, since color printing was expensive. The first black and white title of note was, I believe, Dave Sim's Cerebus, which started as a parody of Conan in 1977. A couple of other titles followed, but the dam really burst in 1984 with the announcement that a couple of guys named Eastman & Laird were going to release a title called Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles.
  • The first inkling I had of the title was a small news item in Comic Buyer's Guide. The problem was that neither Glenwood or Plant thought the book was actually going to come out. The title just sounded right, however, and since it would parody teen-agers (New Mutants, Teen Titans and X-Men), mutants (Marvel loved their mutants), ninjas (there was a big interest in ninjas due to Miller's stint on Daredevil and his series Ronin...some Japanese Manga was also starting to appear at this time) and turtles (well, what's not to like about that...Cerebus was an aardvark!) it seemed like a slam dunk to me. I kept pestering both our distributors and really went out on a limb by ordering something like 15 or 20 copies, which seemed like a lot for an untested title. Looking back on this, I wish I had ordered 50 or 100, because when the book finally came out (don't remember who finally got the copies for us) we sold out within a couple of hours. The book went through a couple of reprintings, the subsequent issues sold out as well and history was made.
  • The success of TMNT made history and proved, along with Cerebus, that comics didn't have to be in color to make a dent in the market. The problem, however, was that not everyone was as talented as Sim or Eastman & Laird. A parody of Dark Knight got lots of attention, but then more and more titles started to appear that were increasingly poor productions that, at times, seemed to parodies of parodies. As I've mentioned in an earlier column, most anyone with a couple of bucks jumped on the black and white publishing bandwagon. Admittedly, there were some gems here and there among all the titles, but most were junk and it seems to me that the total number of black and white titles swelled at one point to nearly equal around half of the output of Marvel and DC. Distributors were afraid that they would lose accounts if they didn't carry the books. Retailers didn't want to lose customers and were hoping for the next BIG TITLE. And then there were the customers, who were convinced they should be salting these books away because look how much TMNT first printings are worth and if we bag these comics they will be worth something someday and I don't want to be left out of the fad and...
  • Eventually, everything came to a screaming halt. Customers, I guess, took time to read some of the books and found them to be dreadful (our moment of truth came early on when we ordered a book called McKenzie Queen, which sounded like a good comic, the art sample looked good and when it arrived it was terrible...once bitten, twice shy). Dealers, who had bought up large amounts of the black and white books, suddenly found that nobody wanted them and were stuck with lots of comics for the quarter bins. Distributors were also caught with their pants down, since many of them had bought extra copies of the books (some distributors were selling copies at cover price or better to their retail accounts) in anticipation of retailer demand (it is thought by many that it was this sudden explosion and even more rapid collapse that led to Glenwood's demise, since the company, reportedly, had case lots of some of the titles in their main warehouse). The end result is that some publishers lost their shirts, others barely skimmed by and Glenwood's collapse put a number completely out of business.
• While the black and white comics were rising and falling, color comics were also undergoing a change. I can't remember exactly when, but DC announced they had decided to use a new printing technology which was called either web-flex or flexographic (my brain is old, after all). The centerpiece of the new technology was that it was faster than the current printing standard and it used plastic plates instead of the metal printing plates that had been the standard for umpteen years, which, in the long run, would save money. The problem: nobody spent money on extensive testing to see just how all this was going to affect the actual printed comics. That all this happened around the time of Crisis on Infinite Earths makes the story even more annoying, but the basic problem was that the new printing process didn't print black well (meaning word balloons were hard to read and black lines were skewing towards grey), half-tones were off and colors were not printing correctly; particularly the color yellow which simply leaped off the page and smacked you in the eyes. Marvel soon followed DC's lead and jumped right in without doing tests either and this is why, for a long span of time in the 80s, all the comics printed from the Big Two look so butt ugly!
• Lastly, just to show that greed has no bounds, there was a movement by some dealers in the late 80s or early 90s to try to squeeze a couple of extra dollars out of back issue sales. Both Marvel and DC were sold direct to comic stores through the comic book distributors (hence the term "direct market") and also distributed by magazine wholesalers to comic racks and newsstands in various stores and whatnot (which is how the spinner rack in the grocery store or 7-Eleven got its comics). Due to being air freighted, the direct sale comics usually went on sale around 1 to 2 weeks sooner than those that went to the magazine wholesalers. In order to keep the direct market comics separate from the newsstand copies (since the newsstand copies were returnable), the direct sale copies had a picture or text in a box on the front cover; the newsstand copies had a UPC code in the box (go check, I'll wait...). Well, these dealers came up with the idea that the direct sale copies were actually first printings and were therefore worth more than the newsstand copies. Not only that, but they suggested that they would no longer be buying newsstand copies from collectors, since these printings were...well, not first printings. This wacky idea started to gain some momentum, until saner heads prevailed and it didn't hurt that the printers mentioned that sometimes the direct copies came off the press first, other times it was the newsstand copies and ALL were printed as part of the same print run (with just a pause to change the plates for the front cover box). Hence, another threat to democracy met a well deserved end!
• And, just to put the Turtle's selling power in perspective, rumor floating around at one time was that Eastman's wife bought him an army tank for his birthday....